Incorporating Expectations as a Basis for Business Service Selection

Abstract. The collaborative creation of value is the central tenet of services science. In particular, then, the quality of a service encounter would depend on the mutual expectations of the participants. Speciﬁcally, the quality of experience that a consumer derives from a service encounter would depend on how the consumer’s expectations are reﬁned and how well they are met by the provider during the encounter. We postulate that incorporating expectations ought therefore be a crucial element of business service selection. Unfortunately, today’s technical approaches to service selection disregard the above. They emphasize reputation measured via numeric ratings that consumers provide about service providers. Such ratings are easy to process computationally, but beg the question as to what the raters’ frames of reference, i.e., expectations. When the frames of reference are not modeled, the resulting reputation scores are often not sufﬁciently predictive of a consumer’s sa...